What I'm about to say should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, has talked to me, or reads my articles: my attention-span is lacking and I like being stimulated or challenged as often as possible. Take my obscene love for the Geometry Wars games; Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 (since that's what I'm playing the most now) is like playing a constant adrenaline rush that is a millisecond-by-millisecond test of a person's hand-eye coordination and always manages to make players feel like they're executing Jackie Chan-like maneuvers through the tiniest, most impossible of situations. Getting a good score in Geometry Wars is something that has kept myself and a person from Shacknews playing the game's three-minute-long Deadline mode in a round-robin fashion since the game's release in order to see which of us could get the highest score that the other simply does not have the skill to get -- for the record, at this point in time it's me with a score of 29.9M which ranks me, Xbox Live Tag: skmittens, as 241st in the world (my friend is somewhere around 400). Not only is Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 a superb shoot-em-up but the developer, Bizarre Creations, maximized the idea of the High Score metagame that the GW2 formula brought with it through efficient use of the Xbox Live leaderboards which display the top five scores of the player and the people on his friends list in the game mode selection screen. It's an absolutely genius design mechanic.

My absolute favorite game genre, though, is real-time strategy. I love the entire process of managing an economy, building up a base and an army, and sending out scouting and strike teams to wreck havoc on enemies. And, while playing Madden NFL 2009 every day for a couple of weeks, I found myself thinking more about the different plays that I had in my Detroit Lions playbook, how I was subconsciously figuring out ways to maximize the yardage I acquired on the following play and, in doing so, get the most of any play by taking advantage of what an opponent would think I would be doing given an offensive line-up. After a few games in this mindset I realized that, in a lot of ways, console football games really are a form of short real-time strategy segments with player/route bookends. It was strange how this realization made me not only enjoy the game more (and I already enjoy football and football video games a great deal) but also become a much better player online in the Shacknews Madden league

These two games -- yes, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 and Madden NFL 2008 -- got me wondering what kinds of possibilities were open to the RTS genre for more action-oriented strategy games that treated game maps as more of strategic set pieces for players to execute a specific strategy, see how it plays out, and then figure out ways to improve upon it to result in the most efficient execution of a certain "play." Out of these thoughts was born Cubegasm.

The Basic Idea is this: a player is given five structures and these are placed at one end of a map. The rest of the map is then populated with a bunch of enemies, towers, walls, and strongholds. The only thing the player needs to focus on is clearing a given goal for a map in the shortest time possible while maximizing his/her score through efficient use of his units, quickly dispatching enemy units and structures, and ensuring the survival of the player's five structures. Each of the five structures will spawn a certain type of unit; the spawning rate will be adjustable by the player in the sense that if, say, Structure A has its spawning rate jacked up then Structures B, C, D, and E will also suffer decreased spawning rates to compensate. The player can balance the spawning rate of his units to fit whatever strategy he plans on employing for a given map. I'm not sure about this but, ideally, I'd like there to be no hard unit cap placed on the player; instead, I will place a score "handicap" on the player when he starts using more than the map's maximum suggested unit amount.


The five unit types will be consistent from map-to-map; these will be the toolkit of a player's strategy. Through intelligent use of spawning rates, a player can customize his army to deal with any situation effectively. And, since this is something that bugs me a great deal about most strategy games outside of Supreme Commander, all of the attacks, both ranged and melee, will depend on actual collision detection. If a shell is fired from a ranged unit then the only way it will do damage to anything is if it actually collides with an enemy unit. The ranged unit will have code to handle predictive targeting of any target a player chooses (or automates) to reliably hit a target but, if the ranged unit is maximizing its range and the target is not stationary, it's very possible for the shell to miss. The last thing I want is to just throw a bunch of random numbers into a mathemetical equation to determine if a unit hits or misses its target. The following units make up the crack squad of cubes in Cubegasm:

• Melee Cube: This cube will have a high hit threshold and moderate/high damage output, but its attack range will be limited to a physical proximity to its target and the unit's inability to attack flying units.


• Flying Cube: This is low-health flying unit that is capable of dealing high damage bombing runs and very low air-to-air damage output.


• Ranged Cube: This unit is a medium-health unit capable of attacking units in a short-to-mid range capacity with a low damage output. It is the only unit capable of attacking flying units with any real potency.


• Artillery Cube: The artillery in Cubegasm is a glass cannon in the truest sense. It will have a very low health capacity but its maximum range will be the length of most of Cubegasm's maps and its damage output will be absurd with a relatively decent splash damage radius. The mere concept of creating, coding, and animating the artillery for the game is about half of the excitement of making the game for me.


• Heal Cube: A healing cube will have moderate health but no attack whatsoever. Its sole goal in life is to undo the damage caused to any player unit or structure and it will execute that purpose with determined cube ferocity. If a structure is destroyed at some point in a given game then, if the player still has healing cubes handy, the structure can be restored to full health and used again to spawn units. It would be a relatively timely process, probably in the range of a full minute or two (which, given the timespan of most maps, would take a player completely out of "time attack" range), but it would allow a determined player to make a comeback if things get grim.

And, for an overall discussion of the game, I think that will do it for now. I'm working on the particle engine this week and, if things go accordingly, I should be able to start on implementing the structure logic and at least one of the five units for testing. My goal is to get a prototype level up and running by the end of October but that is, most likely, a pie-in-the-sky time estimate. If the prototype gameplay is entertaining enough for me and some of my friends then I'll work on a map editor and go for a complete game with the concept. I've never really posted about a game design before so, uh, yeah. Feedback would be neat.